Explainable AI

Current research on explainability and interpretability of machine learning algorithms

This site is a community effort by the Explainable AI members. Please join the group and reach out to the administrators if you have any questions.

Made with Jekyll and Hyde. Idea and base code for the website adapted from ml4code.

Attention Interpretability Across NLP Tasks

Shikhar Vashishth, Shyam Upadhyay, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Manaal Faruqui. 2019

[ArXiv]    

The attention layer in a neural network model provides insights into the model’s reasoning behind its prediction, which are usually criticized for being opaque. Recently, seemingly contradictory viewpoints have emerged about the interpretability of attention weights (Jain & Wallace, 2019; Vig & Belinkov, 2019). Amid such confusion arises the need to understand attention mechanism more systematically. In this work, we attempt to fill this gap by giving a comprehensive explanation which justifies both kinds of observations (i.e., when is attention interpretable and when it is not). Through a series of experiments on diverse NLP tasks, we validate our observations and reinforce our claim of interpretability of attention through manual evaluation.